How top anaesthetist's 'fraudulent' claims have put millions of NHS patients at risk

Millions of NHS patients could be at risk after they received treatment based on 'fraudulent research' by one of the world's leading anaesthetists, it has emerged.

Joachim Boldt, 57, is accused of forging up to 90 influential studies on fluid drugs known as colloids, used to boost blood volume in patients going under the knife.

The anaesthetist, who is a specialist in intravenous fluid
management, was sacked from his job at German Ludwigshafen Hospital last
November amid the allegations.

Withdrawn: Four key colloid studies - on which guidelines for British anaesthetists are based - have been formally retracted shaking the medical world to its core

Over the last ten years he has published many papers advocating
colloids which contradicted other studies highlighting their risks, which include kidney or heart failure and severe loss of blood - all of which could
lead to death in surgery.

Now four key colloid studies - on
which guidelines for British anaesthetists are based - have been
formally retracted shaking the medical world to its core.

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A number
of British journals have also run Mr Boldt's Consensus Guidelines on
Intravenous Fluid Therapy advocating the drugs, including the
Association of Surgeons and the Intensive Care Society.

Association
president Prof John MacFie told the Daily Telegraph: 'We have withdrawn
the guidelines from our website and we will need to
rewrite the article.

'The profession I represent does
not want to be to be associated with potentially fraudulent research'

Fired: Anaesthetist Joachim Boldt, who is a specialist in intravenous fluid management, was sacked from his job at German Ludwigshafen Hospital last November amid the allegations

He drew links with the scandal of Andrew Wakefield who was struck off last year for falsely claiming he had proved that the MMR vaccine and autism were linked.

He added: 'What
Wakefield did had terrible implications on children's lives, and the
principle of this is the same.'

German medical authorities are probing 92 of his papers and a criminal investigation is also underway.

Allegations include forging documents, testing drugs on patients without their consent and claiming payments for surgery he never performed.

An habitue of the international medical conference circuit, Mr Boldt received funding from producers of hydroxyethyl starch (HES) – the colloid he most strongly advocated – which he lauded as the 'holy grail' of intravenous drugs.

But they are up to ten times more expensive than crystalloids, the other form of liquid drug, which are believed to be safer because they contain smaller molecules which are more readily absorbed into the body.

In one paper he noticed that the pattern shown by his data was 'too perfect to be believed'.

But Prof Eike Martin, head of the investigating commission, told The Telegraph: 'At first we thought that all the studies were 100 per cent invented, but now we have found a huge amount of clinical data from trials that were conducted.

'Our suspicion is that the trials are not reported accurately in the papers. Prof Boldt was an advocate for colloids and that was the conclusion of his studies, but the data he published is different from the original data we have seen.

Dr Rupert Pearse, a senior lecturer in intensive care medicine at Barts and
the London School of Medicine, and co-author of the British guidelines on
fluid drugs, told the Telegraph: 'For me, it shakes the world I work in and makes me feel less confident in it,
and if I were a member of the public I would feel the same.'